Schools across the UK are being invited to become part of StoryQuest 2006, and begin their own quest for spoken word stories.
Why not get involved?
Get storytelling into your curriculum and get your kids working with oral narratives, collecting stories, telling stories themselves and responding to stories in wild and wonderful ways.
StoryQuest aims to inspire children to tell stories and to listen to, collect, and respond to stories from storytellers, their families and their communities.
Why storytelling?
Setting the imagination on fire:
Oral stories stimulate immediate and vivid imaginative responses in the listener as each child conjures their own images in the cinema screen of the mind's eye.
Story-tellers and story-listeners:
Children of all ages are enthralled by storytelling and the chance to become storytellers. Hearing and telling stories gives children access to narrative without the boundaries of paper, pens and print. Retelling stories draws on language and speaking skills, requiring children to sequence events, select language, empathise with and develop characters and evoke settings for whoever their audience may be.
Crossing boundaries:
Stories cross boundaries of time, geography, and culture.
They are filled with opportunities to stand in the shoes of character after character understanding their motives and emotions, their actions and the consequences of those actions.
They engage both tellers and listeners with debate over decisions, and predictions of outcomes. Collecting stories from friends and relatives binds and finds commonality between people within and across generations and cultures.
Dealing with ideas:
Children are story experts. Because narrative is the most familiar way of organising experiences, they implicitly know a lot about stories, how they're constructed, what to expect and how to respond. At the same time this familiarity reinforces story language and structure whilst dealing with big issues and big ideas.
What Stories?
Storytellers work with folk tales, fairy tales (wonder tales), myths and epics from across the world and across history. They will also deal in jokes, proverbs, tongue twisters, riddles and rhymes. Local storytellers may know of local stories and legends. A storyteller is a walking library of narratives, which can provide a rich resource for work within the classroom and at home.
Who are the Storytellers?
If you're after a storyteller who can come into school, then take a look at our list of storytellers.
If you're a teacher who wants to tell stories, then take a look at our top tips
What to do with stories…
There are endless ways in which you can link storytelling to the curriculum, and follow up storytelling and work with stories in school. We've got lots of ideas to start you off…